


winter broken like lace

by feralphoenix



Category: Mawaru Penguindrum
Genre: Age Difference, F/F, Fix-It, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Post-Canon, Queerplatonic Relationships, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 16:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3657675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Ah,” he says, quite naturally, as though he has just opened the door to her hospital room and she is curled up like a shrimp in the bed sulking, her latest knitting dumped in the garbage can again. “Ah. How very electrifying. It is an honor to see you again, princess.”</i>
</p>
<p>Super Frog saves Watase Sanetoshi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	winter broken like lace

**Author's Note:**

> _(it’s not like anything they compare it to_ – joy of our desiring)

They had a conversation, once—either while she was still hospitalized, or when she was going back for regular check-ups. She is not sure which it was: They had a lot of conversations, after all.

The magazine was in between them and her bag of knitting was next to her. She remembers the smell of the sun, the light that fell on his pale hair and made it too bright to look at directly. His boys were asleep in their basket, and Sunny’s knitting needles clacked at a steadier rhythm than her own in the background, with the chirping of faraway birds as counterpoint.

It was the book poking out of her bag that reminded her, in the end, and she laid her needles down carefully so as not to unravel the… scarf, it was probably still a scarf—to pick it up instead.

“Where should I return this?” she asked him, holding it out. “I tried to have Shou-chan bring it back to the library, but he said it wasn’t in their database and he couldn’t. I’d hate to incur overdue fees.”

He raised a hand to his mouth, considering. “I am very surprised that you managed to keep hold of that,” he said mildly, and his gaze slid to the side. Sunny went right on knitting with all due innocence. “Let alone that you are able to remember where it ought to go.”

“I don’t think that I would be able to find the right door even if I tried to go back,” she said, and balanced the heavy book in one hand in order to tuck her hair properly behind her ear. “You said it really was an annex of Central Library, but it’s not, is it?”

“It is,” he said, and rested his wrist back along his uplifted knee. He had lowered his eyelids and his smile had broadened in a way that made him look very insincere indeed, but for him was probably much more honest than his usual gentle expression. Dr. Sanetoshi was still a very strange man, and he liked to cloak everything in tricks of metaphor, but for all of that she really did like him very much. He had done her a lot of very kind favors, and she could talk to him about knitting and he would give actual feedback, unlike her brothers; if he played at denseness while nudging her into thinking of painful things sometimes, they were always painful things she ought to have been thinking about long before. She was not so very good at reading him all the time, but she was getting better. “It is also true that not just anyone can get in, and even the people who can get in will have trouble finding their way back. The destination of one’s fate is like the phantom tollbooth, or the doorway into Narnia. Just when you thought that you found the hole the rabbit led you through the first time, you’ll fall through your mirror instead.”

“If I don’t know the way back, how do I return this?” she asked, frowning down at _Super Frog Saves Tokyo._

“The Hole in the Sky Annex is remarkably lenient, I find, in its lending periods. If you ever need to go back, you will be able to return it then with no charge.”

“Hmm,” she said, and put it back in its bag.

“Well, all that said, you must be bored with only one such book. I can find others for you if you like—fairy tales about girls who want to become princes, for instance, or picture books about love stories between people and bears.”

Unspoken went the obvious riposte that an ordinary doctor ought not to be able to offer to get his patient books from a paradox, but Schrodinger’s cat had left the box and was leading its kittens off down the partition already, vanishing from sight. She giggled instead, dancing around the obvious. “Love stories between people and _bears?”_

“Quite a touching volume, if I do say so myself,” said Sanetoshi, his poker face perfect as ever. One of his bunnies was squirming out of the basket, and he picked it up, holding it in the crook of his arm to stroke its belly while its nose twitched in hypnotic circles. “Ah, but best to stick with the picture book. The full novelization might not be appropriate yet for a girl your age. Either one will give you ideas, though. The real world isn’t so kind.”

She put her chin in both hands and watched him for a while. “You don’t believe it, then? That love can open a closed world?”

And that was when he first mentioned boxes to her.

His voice got deeper when he let himself show his anger, she remembers thinking. He must have realized his own honesty too late, because before she could think of a reply he sighed and leaned his head back to look at her from the corner of his eye, all innocent surprise.

“But really,” he said, soft smile back in place: “You _have_ read the story already after all. How very lax of your brothers.”

She gave him her best exaggerated naughty shogun laugh. “Thou must not underestimate the resourcefulness of young ladies.”

“Certainly,” he said, and bowed to her from his seat. He set the rabbit sitting on him on the floor, where it turned into a small boy and chased after its brother, who had escaped the basket and was peeking through windows on tiptoe. “Do you know, this is the second time that I have underestimated feminine precociousness. One would think that even I would have learned my lesson by now.”

If she asked he would dance away—that was the kind of person he was—so she laughed instead and picked her knitting up again. Sunny was already finished with her scarf.

Maybe the conversation went on further, and maybe he left to do whatever inscrutable things he did when left to his own devices: She doesn’t remember any more.

 

 

Himari’s parents were both out on business trips, so: They stayed at her little house that night. They were usually stuck between a rock and a hard place: Ringo’s closable, lockable apartment door versus her much-too-small twin bed; Himari’s futon versus the thin paper walls and her parents’ room right there. Study nights were study nights, after all, Ringo really _was_ helping her make sure she’d be able to get into the same high school, because she was fifteen now and had to worry about those things. But they were also nights for gossip, and cooking experiments, and fooling around. Ringo’s mother and Himari’s parents were well-meaning, but neither of them was really all that interested in having to explain if things got too loud.

In this world, the Takakura house was still a little shed with too few rooms, crowded, thoroughly lived in. It wasn’t a Mika-chan house. Himari didn’t have that extravagant bed; the playground wall wasn’t painted in a dozen bright colors. What she did have was a normal girl’s normal room, shelves worth of Double H merchandise, a red book and a stuffed bear from other places and times. She had a thin scar on her forehead, like a promise.

Ringo doesn’t remember as much as Himari does, will probably never remember as much, but it’s enough for Himari that there is still someone who knows about a world where Kanba and Shouma lived under this same roof, filled the little house up with their clumsy love. A world where she had one brother who would take on all the dirty work and not tell anyone, and another who would never let anyone he loved go hungry.

But, so, Ringo had decided to stay over, and things had gone the usual way. The house smelled pleasantly of curry, and Ringo was curled up naked on the blanket. Himari’s eyes had fallen on the fan while spacing out and even though it was late summer and her hair was sticking to her back, she thought of winter and shivered.

Soon she would have to get up. She had to put tea on if they were going to last to get any studying done, and she had to package up rolled cabbage for the neighbors because otherwise she’d have to leave the leftovers in the fridge to get icky, and she had to check to make sure that the cat wasn’t getting into any mischief. But the fan blades held her paralyzed in memories, and she couldn’t make herself move.

“Hey, Ringo-chan,” she said.

“Hmm?” said Ringo from the other side of the futon.

“Do you ever think about Momoka,” she said.

A rustle; Ringo had rolled over and was, Himari could tell from the corner of her eye, frowning up at her, face in hand. Ringo’s bangs were getting long again and covered her eyebrows completely, but Himari knew a scowl when she saw one.

“She’s my sister, of course I think about her,” Ringo said.

That wasn’t what Himari meant, and Ringo probably knew her well enough to be aware of that.

“I do think of her,” Ringo went on, “but wherever she is now, I know she’s all right. I know we’re all going to be all right. Mama and Papa, and Tabuki-san and Yuri-san, we’re all still connected even though we’re living different lives. Momoka was here. Maybe it made all the difference that we were possessed by her ghost back— _then,_ but it’s not like that now.”

And that was when Ringo told Himari about Tabuki Keiju’s theory.

“Are you that worried about Kanba-kun and Shouma-kun?” Ringo asked, after she had finished explaining and Himari had been quiet for a few minutes.

“No,” Himari said, though it had been a good guess. “Kan-chan and Shou-chan are together, so wherever they are now, I know they’ll be fine.”

She looked at the fan again. Her brothers were not the problem.

 

 

Himari had loved Murakami since she was little, but it wasn’t until this year in school that she’d ever read any Miyazawa. She had made it through _Night on the Galactic Railroad_ once and never been able to pick it up again. It was different, reading the book herself, than it had been knowing this or that part of the plot just through cultural osmosis. She had nearly lost everything she ever loved to scorpion fire: Even though one might rue that one’s own life has never amounted to anything, that does not mean that everyone else, too, thinks that one has no value.

It is easier to get on a train to the stars when you don’t know its significance; easier to drift aimlessly towards a library called Hole in the Sky when you had only ever known the Coalsack as a nebula.

But she wants to believe that there’s some purpose to her being here, so she tucks _Super Frog Saves Tokyo_ under her arm and gets on the train, and goes to sleep.

It’s exactly how she remembers it. The aquarium, the elevator. Sunny isn’t here to lead her anymore, so she has to kick the control panel herself. She remembers, with all the clarity of dream confidence, which button she has to push.

The library, too. She stands in line, tells the desk lady “I’d like to return this, please”—but the lady smiles at her.

“This title is not in our inventory,” she says. “To return it, you will have to go deeper.”

Himari picks the book up and holds it out in front of her in both hands. She grips it so hard her knuckles turn white.

“Thank you,” she says. “I’ll search for the right place myself. I should be able to find it by tracing my memory of the last time I looked.”

It takes longer to find the door this time. Before she was just so frantic to not lose sight of Sunny, to not be left alone, but this is deliberate; she wants to set every foot just right. But in the end she finds the right corner, and she waits for the sliding puzzle to fall into place.

The crackling recording of Going Home is silenced as soon as the heavy door closes behind her. Stretching out above her are the patterned windows and bars, and the distant blue sky beyond them—before her, the fence, and the curved floor, which she still can’t look at directly for fear that she will be sucked into the endless hole. And beyond: The bookshelves that stretch on forever, the last repository for all the stories of humanity.

In the distance, the hum of some great machine. Or maybe an incinerator. Himari shivers, lets herself indulge in the moment of fear, and then squares her shoulders. She lines her feet up with the painted directory, a sign of life on sterile tile, points her toes after the arrow that will lead her into the _ka_ section of titles.

 

 

And he is there, sitting on the middle rung of a ladder: Elbows on his knees, staring out into space, every detail exactly as she remembers.

Himari stops not quite a meter away, feet lined up politely, the red book clutched to her chest, waiting. She lifts her chin, traces the dear countenance with her eyes, and smiles. He really is here. He’s really been here, all along; the hard part is over. Now all that’s left to do is the hard part.

Sanetoshi raises his head, turns halfway to stare at her. His eyes are red as a rabbit’s; his smile is very soft and questionably honest. If he’s surprised to see her here, his expression doesn’t betray it. Well, one’s footsteps do tend to echo here. The Hole in the Sky Annex seems terribly lonely that way.

“Ah,” he says, quite naturally, as though he has just opened the door to her hospital room and she is curled up like a shrimp in the bed sulking, her latest knitting dumped in the garbage can again. “Ah. How very electrifying. It is an honor to see you again, princess.”

He stands up and bows, and she giggles before she can help it. She wants very much to walk over and touch him—which is very different from her longing to touch Ringo, which is a bubbly feeling that makes her want to pace and dance and turns her whole face red. She wants to hold his face in her hands, a steady kindness like picking up Sunny for cuddles, or standing in the kitchen with Shouma, or being carried by Kanba.

But it’s cold here. You have to be gentle in a Frozen World; one wrong move too many and they’ll break instead of melting.

So Himari holds the book out. “I’ve brought this back,” she says.

Sanetoshi bows again, theatrical. She can almost hear the harpsichord, and when she hands _Super Frog Saves Tokyo_ over, she clasps her hands at her front, fingers wanting to trace the memory against her own skin.

He holds the book up in one hand, balances it standing on his palm, and strokes the spine with one fingertip. He taps it, very casual, and the book bursts into stars that fade as they fall towards the ground.

“I do hope it was to your liking,” he says, and she walks forward to line up at his elbow, and they stroll onward, like this is as benign as a walk in the garden.

Himari smiles. “Oh yes,” she says. “I love Murakami. I like to reread my old favorites sometimes, because they always mean more when you’ve lived longer. Books are like old friends that way, they always have new surprises for you.

“When I was little, I liked Frog the best, because he was the hero who sacrificed himself to save everyone. And then when I was older I liked Katagiri more. He reminds me of Kan-chan. It helps, knowing that I’m not alone, and I can never afford to forget again how I’m still alive right now. Kan-chan and Shou-chan, and Ringo-chan and Double H, and my mother and father, and you too—you’ve all given me so much.”

“I see,” says Sanetoshi. “And what about now?”

“This time,” says Himari, “I realized that my favorite character is Worm. Frog says it all best, but I didn’t pay attention until this time. None of it was Worm’s fault. People are also to blame. If there had been a way to save Worm instead of having to fight him, maybe no one would have had to die.”

“Salvation,” Sanetoshi says, “is never as easy as people think it is.”

Himari nods. “It’s worse when they expect you to save yourself all alone, without help from anybody. And people like us…”

He had a suitcase, she remembers, filled with the distilled essence of chosenness in neat pink ampoules. For the price of Kanba’s help, his misanthropy honed to something deadly, Sanetoshi had slipped the ambrosia of apples into her veins, to ward off the punishment and the unchosenness that were killing her.

“If we could save ourselves, we would,” she says in the end. But only the chosen can save the unchosen.

“I know, right?” Sanetoshi says, too flippant to be anything other than deliberate.

They walk in silence for a while. He takes smaller steps, to stay in pace with her.

“What book would you like this time,” he says at length. “As the head librarian here at the Hole in the Sky Annex, I will find the volume of your deepest desires from within our repositories without fail—like hunting for a single pearl in all the seven seas.”

He isn’t head of anything that exists anymore, but his plain apron and nametag look very nice on him, so she just tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles indulgently.

“Another Murakami, perhaps?” he asks, tilting his head so that his hair falls into his eyes.

“Not today,” she says, “but thank you.”

“Hmm,” says Sanetoshi. “Well, you always were a tricky customer. But the book you want to read from the bottom of your heart is here somewhere. Even if we shall have to go deeper to find it.”

He makes as if to continue their promenade, but Himari stays still. She takes a deep breath and balls her hands into fists, steeling herself.

Sanetoshi notices that she’s not following him, and turns around, head tilted in an unspoken question. There is a black rose tucked neatly into his breast pocket where there was a pen before. Himari doesn’t like to see it perched there, like death, and doesn’t like the faint smell of fire that hangs about it. She reaches out and takes it, setting it behind his ear instead.

“I’m not here to check out another book,” she says. Her fingertips are still brushing his hair, which is soft as silk. She wants to touch his face, but she forces herself to be patient. “I’m here to cross the wall. I’m here to become real friends with you.”

She thinks his eyes widen, just slightly, but then he is smiling again. He reaches up to cup the back of her hand, his touch as light as if he’s handling an egg. His fingers are deathly cold. When she breathes out, the air turns into frost and falls like stars.

“You ask difficult things,” he says. It’s more of a whisper. He lets her hand go, steps away again. The flower in his hair withers and turns to ash, vanishes without a trace. “I am waiting for the train.”

“So you don’t chase, after all.”

He looks down at her. The lights have all switched off, and only the distant skylights illuminate his profile. There are shadows underneath his eyes like bags.

“If you chase, you’ll just tire yourself out,” he says, and smiles at her with narrowed eyes. “And just because you chase, it won’t guarantee that your love will bear fruit.”

“That’s true,” she says, and does not think of Shouma. “Sometimes if you wait for long enough—you’ll be found.”

“I will never be found,” he says. The spotlights flip on, burning her in place; the only light that illuminates him is what reflects off her. It makes his profile seem unnecessarily harsh. She must have blinked somewhere, because he’s wearing his white coat with the high collar, and his librarian’s apron is nowhere to be seen. “That is why I wait for the train.”

Himari is not Momoka. She can’t convert her life into scorpion fire to change the world however she pleases. But she was once a bride of fate, and she remembers life before the transfer. She touches the scar on her forehead, for courage.

“Survival Strategy,” she says, and because they are here at the train station of fate, the spotlights converge and turn to starlight.

The Teddydrums are frozen, still. It isn’t utterly dark, but the path from one to the next is not a slope but perfectly even. Sanetoshi, in the distance, is on his knees with his hands bound in the air, looking at the ground instead of at her. The red light that orbits him could be a severed cycle, but perhaps it’s a bee instead. Himari squares her small shoulders and takes a step onto the path, careful in her platform heels.

“Do you know why kisses are promises?” she asks, pointing her toe like she’s playing pretend ballet. The train of her gown explodes into a thousand stars. “It’s because kiss is love backwards. That’s why kisses become love, and love becomes kisses.”

“If you keep kissing without love,” Sanetoshi says without looking at her, “you’ll just freeze over.”

“If you don’t give up on love,” says Himari, “then one day true love will come to you.”

“It’s better to freeze from kissing than to freeze from doing nothing at all,” he says, as easily as he said the same thing to her back in the hospital. “But is it true love when all you’re doing is hoping someone will approve of you?”

“I don’t know,” says Himari, with her high ruff scattering stardust behind her.

“People… are always drawn to pure things, you know,” Sanetoshi says. “But purity is a non-renewable resource. Once a prince’s purity is all used up, he will become Lord of the Flies, just like when a princess’s purity is consumed, she will transform into an ugly witch.”

“I think that doesn’t matter,” she says, and takes another step.

“Once you become empty, you’ll be thrown away.”

Her bare feet come to a rest on the platform. She’s naked, by now, but so is he, so she doesn’t mind. “The people who chose me and saved me from becoming invisible might have been afraid of becoming empty. I don’t know. But if they were, it didn’t stop them from passing being chosen on to me.”

Sanetoshi does not look up at her. His pale eyelashes brush against his cheeks, like dove feathers.

“My most precious person told me something a while ago,” she says. “That there’s a reason we’re still alive, even after we’ve been left behind. We can help other people. We can help the people who are beyond help, like we were. You can’t find someone who’s invisible unless you’ve been invisible yourself.”

The red light that had swung warningly around his body as if to guard against her approach has, without her noticing it, begun to encircle them both instead. Himari puts her hands on either side of Sanetoshi’s face to lift it up, and without further ceremony, she kisses him politely on the mouth.

A roar in her ears: The distant hum of running machines. The smooth crystal under her feet becomes rough metal; it’s cold, but there’s a heat from below, and the hateful sound of breaking glass from far away.

Himari opens her eyes. She’s four years old in the dead of winter with the same old peeling band-aid on her knee. But gripped in her hand is the lantern of life. She walks around the pale crumpled outlines on the conveyor belt, head high.

He’s there. Smaller than her, curled up on his side with a stuffed penguin and a stuffed rabbit in his arms. Pale as glass, and nearly as lifeless. His child’s face is stained red, eyes dull.

“I never amounted to anything,” he says. “No one was there to rescue me. I’m invisible. There is no spotlight to find me in the middle of the crowd. That is why I hate the world that never acknowledged me. I can see the boxes that sever human beings from each other, but I don’t know how to get out of them. Destruction must be the only way.”

“It’s not the only way,” she says. “You know the love story you told me back then? I think you already knew what the answer to the riddle was. Because here we are—the real me, and the real you.

“You can’t be Campanella, and you can’t be Worm. So, you see, you mustn’t stay in a place like this. If you don’t freeze, you’ll burn. You don’t need to hide away in a beautiful coffin. There are ways to revolutionize even the most tightly closed worlds.”

The child that Sanetoshi was curls up tighter. “I can’t leave. This is my punishment.”

“No,” she says, and smiles as she kneels down. The roar of the Child Broiler threatens to drown out her voice, but she holds out her hands instead. “The real punishment is to keep living.”

He opens his eyes—pink still, just like a rabbit’s. When he sits up he is shaky and weak, like he’s on the verge of death from loneliness.

She keeps smiling, holding the apple out, unwavering. “Let’s share the fruit of fate.”

The spotlights flare to life. She and he are standing at the side of the bookshelf again, Sanetoshi looking down at her with a wide-eyed expression she’s never seen him make before.

Her bag is back on her shoulder where it belongs, so she reaches into it. “I found you,” she says, and loops the muffler she knitted for today over his shoulders with her best toss.

The wall of lights shatter. The bookshelves twinkle and disappear. What Himari had thought was a yawning void beside them lights up to show a pair of train tracks, the Milky Way falling in curtains all around.

“It’s time to go home,” she says.

 

 

They pause standing on the tracks just once, hand in hand, when Sanetoshi looks over his shoulder as if bidding the Coalsack goodbye only to go rigid. Curious, Himari peeks back too, and—there she is. Far enough away to be a dark silhouette, but not so far as to be indistinguishable.

Sunny is standing at her side. Further—much, much further back along the tracks, there are a small pair of figures that Himari thinks she knew in another life.

Himari squeezes Sanetoshi’s hand as hard as she can, but he does not attempt to escape her grip.

Momoka smiles at them, and Himari isn’t sure if the smile is kind or if it’s mean. The next moment she has turned and is scampering away, a gaudy penguin hat gripped in either hand. The black rabbits that had hidden in her shadow turn into boys, each holding Sunny by the wing. They wave bye-bye and then turn to follow after Momoka and the distant children, not looking back once.

 

 

Himari wakes up with a start. _Super Frog Saves Tokyo_ is gone from under her arm, of course. Sanetoshi’s hand is still wrapped tightly around hers. The other passengers on the train don’t treat his presence as anything out of the ordinary, but neither do they seem not to see him at all.

Himari smiles and smiles and doesn’t stop.

 

 

It’s already nightfall when they arrive at the right station, and it is gray and raining, but Ringo is waiting outside the door with an umbrella jammed under her arm.

“We’re back,” Himari says, still unable to keep from grinning.

“Welcome back,” says Ringo, who is looking Sanetoshi up and down and giving him her best dubious eyebrow.

“This is my friend Dr. Sanetoshi,” Himari says brightly.

“I can’t believe you,” Ringo says. “You take your book back, you manage to actually bring your weird terrorist ghost friend home, and you forget your umbrella. What would you do without me?”

“Thank you for saving us from getting colds, Ringo-chan.”

Ringo rolls her eyes and opens the umbrella. “We’re not all going to fit under this thing,” she says. “Especially not the tall one over there.”

“Oh dear,” says Sanetoshi, the first time he’s spoken since Himari took him by the hand. “Well, if worse comes to worst, I believe I will probably be all right thanks to this lovely hand-knit muffler.” And he tosses one end, plus his hair for good measure.

Ringo, meanwhile, is regarding him with the same kind of disgusted look she used to favor Tokikago Yuri with once upon a time. She turns to Himari. “This guy’s really lucky you like him,” she grits out.

“I know, right?” Sanetoshi says brightly. Ringo hisses. Himari laughs and takes Ringo’s free hand; even with everything, she’s now sure that the two of them will be getting along in no time.

 

 

The walk home is short, but barely has Himari gotten the ingredients for dinner out of the refrigerator than Sanetoshi has fallen asleep sitting at the kotatsu. The very old cat has taken a liking to him, or maybe just to his coat, and is sitting on the trailing coattails, getting black and orange fur all over it and purring.

Ringo, who has set the old stewpot on the range and is now rattling through the drawers looking for the knives and peelers, is still complaining. “Really, Himari-chan, what are you even going to _do_ with him? Sure, your parents aren’t going to be home for a while yet, but if you’re like, look what followed me home, let’s keep him, they’re not going to just say ‘oh sure’.”

“I’m sure they’ll understand,” Himari says, even though she isn’t at all, just hopeful. “Oh, Sunny, don’t play with that, it isn’t a kitty toy.” She tiptoes into the living room to peel the cat away from the apple, which had fallen out of Sanetoshi’s pocket and is now rolling across the floor with all due cheer. Sunny sticks her head under Himari’s chin and purrs, flexing her claws in the front of her blouse.

“I’m not making this curry by myself,” Ringo says, but in a stage whisper, which makes Himari smile.

“I’m coming,” she replies, but she stays for a moment longer to watch Sanetoshi’s hair waver as he breathes. The motion is small and beautiful.

Revolutions don’t have to be big and dramatic, Himari thinks as she ties her apron. You just have to free one person, and the scenery of the whole world will follow suit.


End file.
